FreeBSD is an open source operating system.
The release of the new version of FreeBSD 12.4 was presented, a version that comes almost a year after the release of version 12.3. FreeBSD 12.4 is characterized by being a corrective version that, in addition to solving various problems, also comes with a large number of updates for all those users who have not made the leap to the FreeBSD 13 version.
FreeBSD 12.4 is the new patch release of the 12.x branch that provides corresponding bug fixes and updates since the previous version release.
Major New Features in FreeBSD 12.4
In this new version it is highlighted that added DT5 and SDT test calls to ipfilter packet filter for the dtrace tracking mechanism, as well as that the ability to dump a dump with a copy of ippool in the ippool.conf format. It is prohibited to change ipfilter rules, address translation tables, and ip pools (ippools) from jail environments that do not use the VNET virtual network stack.
Another of the changes that stands out in this new version of FreeBSD 12.4 is the simproved hardware support, besides that fixed bugs in aesni, aw_spi, igc, ixl, mpr, ocs_fc, snd_uaudio, usb drivers. The ena driver has been updated to version 2.6.1 to support the second generation of ENAv2 (Elastic Network Adapter) network adapters that are used in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure to orchestrate communication between EC2 nodes.
Support for Intel CPUs based on microarchitectures Comet Lake, Ice Lake, Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake has been added to the hwpmc (Hardware Performance Monitoring Counter) framework.
En the sh shell, the profile load logic has changed, since now first, all files with the extension ".sh" are loaded from the directory /etc/profile.d, then the file is loaded /usr/local/etc/profile, after which the files with the extension ".sh" are loaded from the directory /usr/local/etc/profile.d/.
In addition to this, we can also find that the utility cp implements protection against infinite recursion when using the "-R" flag, ensures correct processing of flags “-H”, “-L” and “-P” (for example, when specifying "-H" or "-P", the spanning symlinks), the "-P" flag is allowed without the "-R" flag.
On the other hand, it is mentioned that in this version se killed the telnetd server process, whose codebase is not maintained and has quality issues. In the FreeBSD 14 branch, the telnetd code will be removed from the system. Support for Telnet clients remains unchanged.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- The if_epair driver, which is used to create virtual Ethernet interfaces, provides the ability to parallelize traffic processing using multiple CPU cores.
- Improved performance of the nfsd, elfctl, usbconfig, fsck_ufs, and growfs utilities.
- The tcpdump utility provides the ability to set the number of rules that are displayed in the pflog header.
- With DragonFly BSD, the DragonFly Mail Agent (dma) message delivery agent code is synchronized, ensuring message reception and delivery from local mail clients (processing of network SMTP requests over the port is not supported). 25).
- The pf packet filter fixed memory leaks and improved state synchronization by redirecting traffic when using pfsync.
- Updated versions of third-party applications included in the base system: LLVM 13, unbound 1.16.3, OpenSSL 1.1.1q, OpenSSH 9.1p1, file 5.43, libarchive 3.6.0, sqlite 3.39.3, expat 2.4.9, hostapd/ wpa_supplicant 2.10.
Download and Get FreeBSD 12.4
For those interested in being able to obtain this new version, they should know that the installation images are available for amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpcspe, sparc64 and armv6, armv7 and aarch64 architectures.
Additionally images are offered for virtualization systems (QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, raw) and Amazon EC2 cloud environments. FreeBSD 12.4 will be the last update to the 12.x branch, which will continue to be maintained until December 31, 2023. The FreeBSD 13.2 update will be prepared in the spring, and FreeBSD 14.0 is scheduled to be released in July 2023.